Victor Crowley Kills!

Hatchet (Unrated Director’s Cut) (2006)
Directed by Adam Green
Screenplay by Adam Green

It’s unsurprising that Hatchet came out the same year as Behind the Mask. Hatchet is the kind of straight up slasher film that films like Behind the Mask and Scream owe their existence to. The fact that people are still making films like this is proof of the resilience of scary stories of this bent.

Ben, a college student whose girlfriend dumped him for some jerk....Joel David Moore (Art School Confidential, Bones. This guy is always worth a chuckle.)
Marcus, Ben’s friend, or should I say his black friend....Deon Richmond (Not Another Teen Movie. Another comic genius. And he used to be on The Cosby Show)
Buddy #1....Adam Green (Attention: Director Cameo)
Buddy #2...Lance Kelly
Buddy #3....John Gross
Sampson, a hick...Robert Englund (Because it wouldn’t be a horror movie without Robert Englund.)
Ainsley, Sampson’s Son....Joshua Leonard (The Blair Witch Project)
Marybeth, Sampson’s Daughter....Tamara Feldman (Gossip Girl, Dirty Sexy Money)
Misty, a ditzy low budget porn star....Mercedes McNab (Harmony from Angel.)
Jenna, a porn actress with an inflated ego, a degree from Hofstra, and crabs....Joleigh Fioreavanti
Doug Shapiro, an amateur porn director....Joel Murray (Greg’s buddy from Dharma & Greg. Mad Men)
Jim Permatteo, a tourist....Richard Riehle (a fantastic and hilarious actor, and he appeared as Merrick in Buffy)
Shannon Permatteo, his wife....Patrika Darbo (another great actress)
Shawn, the tour operator...Parry Shen (best Chinese Cajun American accent ever)
Reverend Zombie, a shop owner....Tony Todd (Candyman.)
Victor Crowley, a supernatural slasher, handy with an axe....Kane Hodder (Jason lives.)
Young Victor Crowley, a disfigured child....Rileah Vanderbilt (It’s not every director’s girlfriend, now spouse, who would put on horrific makeup to look like the child version of a monstrous axe-murderer ghost)
Mr. Crowley, Victor’s father....Kane Hodder
Halloween Skeleton, a mean child trick or treating....Adam Weisman (Son of Straw Weisman)
Mardi Gras Partygoer...Johnny Rock
Mardi Gras Extra, another partygoer...Kristin Michelle Duncil
Vomiting Girl, a girl vomiting on the streets of New Orleans...Sarah Elbert (Producer)
Balcony Flasher #1, a woman who flashes her bare chest in the hope of getting some beads....Jessica Luebe
Party Girl, a girl who is partying....April Montgomery
Kissing Couple Girl, a girl who is briefly seen kissing someone...Brandy Scott

Original Music by Andy Garfield (He hates Mondays.)
Cinematography by Will Barratt (Some of the most remarkable day for night shooting I’ve seen.)

The first thing to keep in mind when watching Hatchet is that this story was first created by Adam Green in summer camp when he was a kid. That means that this film, this story, is someone’s childhood dream. Yeah. I dreamt of making a film like Lawrence of Arabia or Dr. Zhivago, or at least Star Wars. People dream differently, obviously.
As much as I like a film like Behind the Mask, I know that it wouldn’t even be conceivable if there wasn’t a living tradition of films like Hatchet. I like the commentary, but I understand that the commentary isn’t possible without the text that is being commented on. Hatchet is a good example of that kind of the slasher horror narrative, mostly unencumbered by genre self-consciousness.

The film not only has Robert Englund and Kane Hodder (just like Behind the Mask) but it also has Tony “Candyman” Todd. Green’s Dream also has a bit of a dream cast for him. So, maybe there is some degree of genre self-consciousness in here after all.

Hatchet also proves that a few good jokes, a few good performances from good actors and decent technical effects will make even a ridiculous shopworn premise with plot-holes like white elephants watchable. Mostly.
The comic portions of Hatchet hold up nicely. The cinematography is brilliant. It is, until the end, a very watchable film. It proves the durability of illogical ghost killer narratives like this. If you’ve seen any of the original Friday the 13th films or Halloween or Nightmare on Elm Street then you should be familiar with the structure of the narrative here.

Victor Crowley was a deformed child who was cared for by his father in rural Louisiana. On Halloween some trick or treaters taunted Victor and accidentally set the Crowley cabin on fire. Victor’s father, tried to break down the door with an axe to save his son (why didn’t he try the window?) and unwittingly slammed through the door and Victor’s skull with the axe. And now the ghost of Victor Crowley haunts the woods calling out for his father and viciously killing people. I know what you’re thinking: I’ve heard this story a thousand times before. Yep. You have. There’s nothing new here, really. Hatchet is your standard ghost story, complete with the standard problematics. For instance, shouldn’t it really be Victor’s dad’s ghost who haunts the woods looking for revenge on the mean kids who set his house on fire and made him accidentally kill his kid? If both Victor and his father are now dead, then why would the ghost of a now fully grown Victor call out for his daddy? What kind of implications does this have for your interpretation of an afterlife? Hmmm?

While you chew on those questions let’s backtrack to the plot. The opening bit shows Sampson and Ainsley doing a little bit of nightfishing in the bayou. Good solid horror comedy. Ainsley is a whiny incompetent who is desperately trying to get some acknowledgement from his father, who thinks he’s not as manly as his sister. To cap it all Ainsley nearly gets killed by an alligator while taking a whizz off the side of the boat. This prompts him to stop in midstream (never a good idea, even if you just pissed on an alligator) and get the boat to land where he runs off in search of some privacy. As you can imagine, this is when the unseen Victor Crowley steps in to turn Sampson and Ainsley into some spicy andouille.

Meanwhile, our college student sad loser character Ben is having the worst Mardi Gras ever. It’s broad daylight and people are drinking, vomiting, showing their tits, but Ben is still sad because his girlfriend dumped him. It’s just like the sad guy in Hostel who won’t stop talking about his ex-girlfriend. At least Ben has some sensible friends who depart from him very early on never to return. That leaves his friend Marcus with one of the toughest choices of the film. He makes what seems to be the right call, foregoing the continued debauchery in order to accompany his depressed friend Ben, but it will eventually cost him his life. Sucks to now know the future. But to be fair, at this point in the movie, you could easily see the other friends being lured into a brothel/charnel house and being turned into sausage like they would in a film like Hostel. Or at the very least those drunk guys are going to pick up an STD and not in the cool way but by doing something drunk and stupid like daring each other to lick a toilet seat. And Marcus has already committed the cardinal sin of horror movies (maybe it’s a cardinal sin in real life too?) of being the only minority in a group of white guys. For that matter, if he was the only Anglo in a group of drunk Maoris he’d also be running a risk.

They try to go on Reverend Zombie’s swamp tour, but he doesn’t do swamp tours any more because someone sued him. It’s rare when you get commentary on our litigious society in a horror film, so this is a bit of social commentary treat. So the boys go to Marie Laveau’s shop where Shawn is getting a swamp tour together. Here we learn something about gender relations. Marcus doesn’t want to do the swamp tour, but when he sees Misty and Jenna take their tops off for Doug’s camera while standing around the shop, he finds himself more amenable to taking the tour. This is because men will put up with a lot for even a hint of sex. On the other hand, the tour operators charge the men more than they do the women. This is because the tour operators also know that men will put up with a lot for the company of women, without which there wouldn’t even be the hint of sex. There’s a lot of economic collateral damage in this system, but that’s a discussion for another time. The point is, that Marcus will go on the swamp tour with Ben because Misty and Jenna have already shown him their tits (without the necessity of a beads for breast-viewing barter) which bodes well for any future transactions of the sexual sort that he may be hoping for.
Doug Shapiro, the producer of Bayou Beavers, has thus ensured the continuation of the narrative.
The fellowship thus begins its travel on a little yellow school bus. We have our traveling company: Shawn, the tour operator who knows less about New Orleans than his passengers, Ben and Marcus (hero and sidekick), Doug Shapiro, (the filmmaker with a secret identity), Misty and Jenna (the expendable females), Shannon and Jim Permatteo (the token older couple), and finally Marybeth, the mysterious angry girl at the back of the bus.

You will note that this film has now gone on for nearly forever without any killing. This is probably the best part of this film. It is not a hurried slash-fest. Green takes the time to let you get to know everyone. In this, he surpasses many of the films he emulates. Even after the gang switches from the bus to the tour boat in the bayou, this film could still just be a plain comedy. Even the hillbilly drinking his own piss while nightfishing (seriously, folks, I don’t care how much you like fishing, nightfishing in gator country is a bad idea) who warns the boat to not go down the river because it’s been closed off, is less of a figure of foreboding doom and more of the comic relief in what is already turning into a pretty funny movie.

And then we see a flash of Victor Crowley. And now things go to hell. Marybeth turns out to be on a search mission to find her father and brother. Jim gets his leg bitten by an alligator, thus slowing his movement and lending some urgency to their travel. As with all modern horror films, we are in a place where there is no cell phone coverage. And then Victor Crowley’s story is told and he starts axing people (well, hatchet-ing some, but killing others in more novel ways.) It’s open-minded of Victor to use such a wide variety of means to kill people instead of just using his hatchet. I’m still unsure why Victor needs to kill people, but I guess the psychology is that all normal people shunned and taunted Victor and cause his death and his father’s distress, so he’s really developed a hatred for all people. The question would be if he could ever recognize and find common ground with a similar outcast such as himself, or if his supernatural vengeance is now general, at least in this territorial confine.

The Permatteos die in spectacular and abrupt fashion precipitating the flight of the rest of the fellowship and the revelation of secrets. (We already know that Jenna has crabs.) Doug is killed off and his wallet reveals that he wasn’t really Doug Shapiro, filmmaker, but that he was a mook posing as a pornographer in order to get a collection of porn tapes. I don’t know how much of a revelation this is, because frankly that still makes him a pornographer and it doesn’t preclude him marketing and distributing those tapes for a profit, and since the actresses are already paid, then that would make him a real pornographer though just not as famous as he claims to be.
Shawn gets his head twisted off and Jenna has her chin ground away with a sander (yikes) and is finished off with some impaling (of course--Feminists, start your engines...if you didn't start them earlier, that is). Misty makes it down to final four but the moment they put her on lookout duty you know she’s going to become a torso. That leaves us with a chase through a graveyard with our final three. Shooting Victor Crowley doesn’t work, and even setting him on fire doesn’t seem to finish the job. Which it wouldn’t now, would it? Because he’s already a ghost.
Marcus is killed in the cemetery, because he should have taken his chances with whatever kind of urban legend horror was going to happen with his other drunk friends.
That leaves Ben and Marybeth who are now in love. Okay, maybe not, but they’re going through some serious shared trauma so if they live they might at least attempt to form a relationship. But, true to the spirit of Camp Crystal Lake, the last scene is back on the water with Marybeth being lured to the surface by Victor Crowley using Ben’s detached arm as bait. Yeah, Victor Crowley lives, and he kills. End of movie.

The frustrating thing about this kind of horror movie is that it follows dream logic, (or nightmare logic), which is to say that it isn’t bound by the logic of conscious thought. Which works with dreams because we don’t have those lucid moments of questioning the premise of our dreams and nightmares as often as we do with conscious activities.
So, the question here is WHAT IS VICTOR CROWLEY? And if he is a supernatural being with physical traits then tangling with him at all is guaranteed to result in failure. I haven’t seen Hatchet II, but the premise of that will hopefully resolve this to some extent. But then, real horror movies, the ones that are really scary, are the ones that deal in the inexplicable. Victor Crowley is scary precisely because we don’t know what he is and what he’s capable of or if he can even be stopped. A killer of any form is scary enough. But a killer with supernatural abilities is the stuff that nightmares are made of.

As I said earlier, Hatchet isn’t really an original film. The ground was created and expanded back in the golden age of the great slashers like Jason, Freddie, the Leatherface gang and whatnot. Think of Hatchet as a new subdivision in the same neighborhood. The houses here have new fixtures, but the structure is still the same. And sometimes familiarity isn’t a bad thing, if well done. This film has all of the flaws of the genre but all of the strengths as well. And in the end, it’s a pretty entertaining thing to watch if you can handle the gore content.

Features
1. Commentary w/Adam Green, Will Barratt, Tamara Feldman, Joel David Moore and Deon Richmond
Some fun tidbits here, but it’s not like listening to Bruce Campbell talk about a movie.
2. The Making of Hatchet (2007)
Directed by Sarah Elbert
There is something to be said for the sheer joy that Adam Green shows in making this film.
3. Meeting Victor Crowley (2007)
Directed by Sarah Elbert
I have to say that when I first saw this I thought that calling Victor Crowley a new horror icon was a bit overblown. But with Hatchet II already out there and a third one on the way, I guess the iconification is well under way, even if the icon looks remarkably like other older icons. I suppose that was the point of the exercise. Then again, there have also already been two Gingerdead Man movies and nobody's calling an undead cookie the new face of horror.
4. Guts & Gore (2007)
Directed by Sarah Elbert
Gruesome horror movies are all about learning how to do these special effects, and this is a great look at what (no matter what you think of the film) are some remarkable FX sequences.
5. Anatomy of a Kill (2007)
Directed by Sarah Elbert
Now look at that flip top head sequence again with the knowledge that Green and John Carl Beuchler did it without CGI.
6. A Twisted Tale (2007)
Directed by Sarah Elbert
Maybe you don’t like horror movies, but you do like Twisted Sister, and you’re thinking to yourself, “I wonder if this film has any connection to Twisted Sister” then this bit with Dee Snider is perfect for you.
7. Gag Reel
I think all horror movies should have a gag reel. Note to Adam Green: Don't ever make your actors actually throw up again. It doesn't have to look real for me to get the point that he's throwing up.
8. Trailer
Creepy kid voice narrates this creepy trailer.
9. Previews
Spiral
Joel David Moore in another film involving art and murder. Directed by Adam Green and also featuring Amber Tamblyn, Zachary Levi and Tricia Helfer.
Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon
I will never tire of seeing this trailer.
Horror Comes Home (Anchor Bay promo)
Wow, Anchor Bay really is the home of horror.
Karas: The Revelation
Anime. That's all I have to say about that.